Mad-As-Hell-Men (or Why I Haven't Posted in a While)

I started in advertising during the "Madmen" era. I think the TV show by that name has the office architecture of the time right, but the spirit wrong. I got into the business and and stayed in it because everybody in the better ad agencies was having fun.

Yes, there was smoking, and drinking (and later on marijuana-ing) not to mention tons of fornicating. But all those people on Madmen go about it with such intense, gloomy, humorless earnestness. We were having a ball – telling stories about this one who woke up in the wrong bed on Christmas morning, and that one, who woke up on New Year's eve on a pland to the opposite coast with somebody from the office, not his wife, snuggling up to him him, and the one whose secretary-and-girlfriend parked what turned out to be a stolen Mercedes in his suburban driveway "just for a few days," before she vanished. And then his wife began asking question.

But it's all changed. Now, in real life ad agencies, it's  gloom without even the cheating. I don't think those poor bastards could even find the time to cheat.

I got called into an ad agency (which I shall not name here) to do some freelance work a few days ago. The pay by the hour is pretty pathetic by my old advertising agency standards, but they work so many hours you can make it up on volume.

And I keep having the feeling that I'm behind a barbed wire fence, maybe an electrified barbed wire fence, and that the guards in the tower have instructions to shoot anyone who tries to get over it.

Hey, it's no fun. But then, the only fun these days is getting enjoyed by the one percent who on Saturday mornings get in their golf carts and head for the next hole.

With the new wife.

Besides, a man's gotta work so a man can eat.

See you when the gig is up.